A highly individual artist, sculptor Elie Nadelman worked in a number of styles throughout the first half of the 20th century, exploring classical sculpture and folk art at a time when they had fallen out of favor. Born in Poland, he moved to Munich, where he encountered Jugendstil and the city’s important collection of Greek sculpture. In Paris, he associated with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Gertrude and Leo Stein, while he pioneered abstraction in drawing and in his stylized figural sculpture in bronze, wood, and marble. In the mid 1920s, after returning to New York, he shifted styles from his sleek and stylized representations of modern life to fleshy sculpture of circus performers and dancers.